Egyptian Startup Hits One Billion Notifications From 137 Countries

Despite the politically deteriorating and the economically failing situation in Egypt some Egyptians are striving to create their own slightly different reality. PushBots, a mobile notifications SaaS startup goes today past the one billion notifications mark.

The startup that grew in the Flat6labs Egyptian incubator is a mobile engagement platform that aspires to help mobile app creators to effectively communicate and engage their audience through push notifications.

“The future is increasingly mobile” says Amr Sobhy, the founder and CEO, who happens to be a pharmacy graduate who started PushBots with a self-taught technology geek and medical student Abdullah Diaa, CTO of PushBots. Another proof you don’t need an engineering degree to start a sophisticated mobile service serving millions of mobile users, “We have dozens of mobile apps on our devices, but how many do we really use? a handful. Why? because they have an added value and they are able to send us notifications that make sense to us and make us open those apps and engage” he adds. “If an app doesn’t have an added value, nothing will help, but if it needs a way to communicate PushBots will be of a value” he explains.

PushBots started their beta service in June 2013, a couple of months later, in November 2013 they quickly hit their first 10 millions push notifications sent mark. Today and after one year, PushBots have delivered more than 1 Billion notifications to more than 6.5 Million mobile devices across 137 countries. The under-funded startup was able to get this 100x growth in notification sending in extremely difficult conditions with only a team of two founders and a very small seed funding they got through the Egyptian incubator.

They didn’t stop there, in mid-2014, PushBots launched Instapush.im, a service that helps entrepreneurs monitor critical transactions carried out on their websites by receiving instant notifications. Shortly, Instapush became the first and only Arab, and most probably regional, service to integrate with Zapier and IFTTT, the top two US automation services, that extends its added value to the average user. “Whether it’s a new file in Dropbox or Google Drive, a new subscriber in MailChimp or AWeber, a new task in Basecamp or Asana, or even a new payment in PayPal or Braintree, Instapush will deliver it,” says Sobhy.

Today PushBots drives thousands of apps in international market as well as in the local one. For example, in Egypt brands like Otlob, NogoumFm, NileFM and Sarmady use PushBots to communicate with their users.

Finally, although PushBots doesn’t make enough noise here and there as many startups we encounter (even though some of the noise come without products or achievements) they had some nice global and regional presence. PushBots was named one of the best Top 150 Startup at Pioneers Festival, Europe’s biggest entrepreneurial event as well as making it to the top 50 finalist in the MIT Arab Competition.

Despite being born and raised in Egypt, Sobhy is no stranger to the Silicon valley. He is an alumni of Draper University in California, a world-class school for entrepreneurs by the V.C Tim Draper, the guy behind viral marketing and who made several successful investments as Skype, hotmail and Tesla. He’s also an alumni of Singularity University, a highly-selective program at NASA Ames Research Center funded by Google, Cisco and others with the purpose of gathering technology young visionaries to solve humanity’s grand challenges using exponential technologies.